Griffin Fellows
The key problem that has bedeviled history as a discipline in the past twenty years has been the lack of incentives to write the kind of historical analysis that might be genuinely useful to policymakers. In government, meanwhile, policymakers frequently engage in historical reasoning when making critical decisions, but the practice is rarely done in a systematic way. The Hoover Applied History Working Group’s Griffin Fellows program addresses this fundamental gap between historical scholarship and policy relevance.
The Griffin Fellows program represents a transformative initiative in the field of Applied History. The Hoover Applied History Working Group takes the concept of Applied History and puts it into practice at scale, bringing together exceptional scholars whose work bridges rigorous historical research with real-world policy applications.
Griffin Fellows will conduct high-quality historical research and bring it to bear on contemporary policy challenges, culminating in a Hoover Applied History Working Paper, and presentations at Hoover in Washington, DC.
The inaugural Griffin Fellows have expertise in multiple fields of historical scholarship with relevance to current policy debates, ranging from recessions to sanctions, from the Western Hemisphere to the Black Sea, from semiconductors to presidential tapes and even decentralized finance.
Current Griffin Fellows
Tyler Goodspeed
Griffin Fellow
Tyler Goodspeed is the Chief Economist of ExxonMobil. He previously chaired the White House Council of Economic Advisers and held faculty appointments at Oxford, King’s College London, and Stanford, where he was a Kleinheinz Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He holds a PhD in economics from Cambridge and a PhD in history from Harvard.
Nick Lambert
Griffin Fellow
Nick Lambert studies the strategic implications of globalization and the economics of warfare. After acquiring his undergraduate and graduate degrees at Worcester College, Oxford, he has held a variety of appointments, including an Olin Fellowship at Yale University and the ‘Class of 1957 Chair in Naval Heritage’ at the US Naval Academy.
Joseph Ledford
Griffin Fellow
Joseph Ledford is a Hoover Fellow, Assistant Director of the Hoover History Lab, and Vice Chair of the Applied History Working Group at the Hoover Institution. In August, he will join the University of Texas at Austin as an Assistant Professor of Security Studies, holding a joint faculty appointment in the School of Civic Leadership and the Clements Center for National Security, where he will also serve as Director of Research.
Chris Miller
Griffin Fellow
Chris Miller is a professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University and is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank in Washington, D.C. He has an MA and PhD in history from Yale University and a BA in history from Harvard University.
Luke Nichter
Griffin Fellow
Luke A. Nichter is a Professor of History and James H. Cavanaugh Endowed Chair in Presidential Studies at Chapman University. He has held numerous distinguished appointments, including roles at the Norwegian Nobel Institute, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the University of Michigan’s Eisenberg Institute, the University of Oxford’s Rothermere American Institute, the London School of Economics, and York St. John University.
Manny Rincon-Cruz
Griffin Fellow
Manny Rincon-Cruz is a historian of China and the founder of a venture-backed digital finance company. He is a practitioner of computational history and network science, and his most recent research studies the historical precedents for stablecoin issuance, patterns of global trade, and the rise and fall of the American historical profession. He previously served as the founding executive director of the Applied History Working Group and has an AB and AM from Harvard, where he won the Joseph Fletcher prize, and was previously pursuing a PhD at Stanford.
Ziyi 'Emily’ Wang
Griffin Fellow
Ziyi 'Emily’ Wang is a Research and Teaching Fellow at the Hoover Institution. She holds a BA in history and an MA in international policy from Stanford University and obtained her PhD from the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar. She will assist with the running of the Applied History Working Group in succession to Joseph Ledford.
The Griffin Fellowship program enables top-flight scholars to contribute to Hoover’s Applied History initiative through the support of Kenneth C. Griffin, founder and CEO of Citadel and founder of Griffin Catalyst.
